Founded in Sydney over 20 years ago as a contract packer, Green’s Foods has since grown to become an ASX-listed Australian manufacturer and supplier of blended foods, such as baking mixes and peanut butter, pet food, cereals and snacks.

Employing over 500 staff, the company has six manufacturing facilities in Glendenning in Western Sydney, Inverell, Picton and Leeton in western New South Wales, Nhill in Victoria and Perth in Western Australia.

The Green’s Foods portfolio includes the Green’s, Supercoat, Lowan, Basco and Poppin brands.

The challenge
With the broadening of its product portfolio over a number of years, the consumer relations department at Green’s Foods faced an increasingly varied range of inbound customer requests, questions and feedback by phone, web form, mail and fax.

“Because our existing helpdesk software was no longer being supported, we couldn’t modify it to suit our changing business requirements,” explains IT manager Chris Barclay.

“As a result, the consumer relations team had to manually write out details about each incoming contact and record it after the event rather than when the customer was on the phone, which caused delays in resolving some calls.”

In addition, once caller information was recorded, its ongoing accessibility also posed problems, particularly if the contact was escalated from the consumer relations department to quality assurance or other executive management.

“We had access to very standard reports of issues rather than the summaries and graphical representations of those issues that the business was demanding,” says Barclay.

“Coupled with the lack of support and inability to make changes, it was clear the application was no longer capable of supporting our business.”

The solution
Green’s Foods evaluated a number of alternatives before selecting FrontRange Solutions’ HEAT. FrontRange HEAT is designed to help organisations maximise return on investment by providing a complete service management solution that is easy to maintain and offers a choice of deployment with client server, thin client and/or web-based solutions.

“We chose HEAT due to its adaptability to our business and support for standard tools, such as Crystal Reports,” says Barclay.

“The Accolade Group tailored HEAT to suit our particular business requirements and took care of the implementation and staff training, although the simplicity of HEAT meant we didn’t need the training to be too extensive.”

Green’s Foods purchased five concurrent HEAT licenses and had a working solution within three months of making the purchase decision.

The results
Since implementing HEAT, Green’s Foods has achieved significant improvements in the analysis of consumer relations information.

“We’ve put a lot of effort into the categorisation of calls, which has helped with the analysis and reporting of information that the consumer relations department records,” says Barclay.

“We can now analyse calls from a volume perspective, such as the number of complaints we receive per thousand products sold, and compare these results to actual sales for reporting purposes.”

More importantly, Green’s Foods has been able to modify its products based on customer feedback analysis.

“For example, we found customers were having problems with the packet instructions for microwave popcorn. Using an analysis of the feedback we were getting enabled us to further adapt the instructions to minimise consumer problems,” says Barclay.

“We also typically give customers vouchers as compensation for product issues. Using HEAT, we’ve been able to analyse for and identify repeat callers with a history of complaints to prevent overuse of the voucher system,” he says.

Green’s Foods is also taking advantage of automation features within HEAT.

“We can now generate automatic responses using a web form and send them to the customer, which has been very beneficial for our consumer relations,” said Barclay.

For more information
FrontRange Solutions
www.FrontRange.com.au
0061 2 8080 3300

June 2007